Sal Randolph lives in New York and makes art involving gift economies, social interactions, public spaces and publishing, including Opsound, an open exchange of copyleft music, the Free Biennial and Free Manifesta, a pair of open, internet-mediated "biennials," Free Words, a book infiltrated into bookstores and libraries, and Money Actions, an ongoing series of interventions in which she has given away several thousand dollars to members of the public. She is currently investigating games, recipes, algorithms, codes, and texts. http://salrandolph.com

I might argue it differently: the community that lee put into motion with his piece is an internet community. As we all experience daily, the internet cultivates its own flavors of community, different from the communities that grow up around books, mail correspondence, telephone, or fax. Each of these has its own style, scale, subculture, speed, effectiveness, etc. Most of us move fluidly through many of these communication communities. It seems to me that art which makes use of the communities particular to the internet is as much "internet art" as art which makes use of the algorithmic capacities of computers connected to the internet.

On Feb 10, 2006, at 6:21 PM, Lee Wells wrote:

> Not to be devils advocate but in this case, isn't the internet/ > email/blog> just another vehicle for the dissemination and archive of the > information> for the performance/happening. Technology now provides us with a > quicker way> to get that info out there but is it much different than using the > fax,> phone or mail to alert the select public about the act.

> Hmmm.... I think the term "net.flux" (aside from using the ill-fated> middle-dot--very 1.0:) also requires "'special' knowledge some contend> one needs to appreciate some forms of contemporary art," in order to> be appreciated.>> What's wrong with "net performance"? To me, that's what this is & what> MTAA has done, in same/different ways. It's open & clear. And I love> that it points out the fact that the internet can be used in online &> offline performance...>>>>> Also we need to coin a phrase for this type of work (MTAA has also>> made work along these lines): net.flux anybody?>>

-- Outsider Imagery -- The widespread influence of what one of the artist's (Michael Bell-Smith) called 'internet folk art' -- animated gifs, avatars, personal blogs, home pages, mashups, game sprites, etc. All of the individual quirky production of gazillions of internet users. If you include webcams in that list, then all of the artists on the panel used some of these elements and aesthetics.

-- Nostalgia -- Caitlin Jones brought up the question of whether most of the work had an aspect of nostalgia for earlier (more utopian?) technological times (sometimes just a few years ago) -- all the artists resisted this idea, saying pretty much that it was just too hard to keep up with the absolute now of the internet, and that using aesthetic elements which were a few years in the past was just a side effect of this. Despite that, once the idea of nostalgia was in the air, it was hard to dismiss.

-- The Sublime -- interestingly the Sublime was somehow connected (during the discussion) with being in a gallery (as opposed to being online -- is that the mundane?) -- And as MTAA mentioned on their blog post ( http://www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/news/mriver/rhz_field_trip.html ) there was an amazing mashup on the projector for a good long time with the wikipedia entry for the sublime interrupted by manic (and gorgeous) jodi.org black and white pop-up windows. Sublime indeed. Other candidates for the sublime were Marisa Olson's & Abe Linkoln's universal acid videos (which you can see at http://www.universalacid.net/ ) , Michael Bell-Smith's video Continue (not online, but there's a still at http://www.foxyproduction.com/artist/workview/5/169 ) and Cory Archangel's classic Super Mario Clouds.

-- Memes -- on the internets, no one can hear you unless you meme. Cory Archangel brought up the need for his online work to be meme- able, and also the idea that he keeps his internet work what he called 'fey' -- meaning that it has to function in the non-art context of someone running across it while at work etc. where it's "just a website". Internet artworks have to survive without the hushed chapel of the gallery, competing with all the other information & detritus, and amusement online. One of the strategies internet artworks use as a survival tool is to be meme-able.

-- The Game -- to roughly quote Michael Connor "The last thing you want to tell somebody is that the Superbowl is just a game -- 'turn that off, it's just a game'. Art isn't just a game. It's a *game*." Meaning that the fact the art world is a play space, and that art is a kind of game doesn't make it any less serious, if anything it makes it more serious. I believe he used the word 'transcendent'. There's that sublime again.

-- 2.0 -- No one on the panel really thought we were at a 2.0 moment, but I wonder if we might be without knowing it. To me the interesting element of what's usually called web 2.0 is the shift from websites as spaces of presentation towards websites as genuinely social spaces. Most of the panelists worked in the (very extended) tradition of video, so we didn't really see the other side of net art, the really networked, collaborative end of things which is a much a part of net art as what might be visible on a screen.

>>> On 2/8/06, Lee Wells <lee@leewells.org> wrote:>> Curious to hear what people thought about the Panel at EAI on Monday?>>

reading between, an internet based project exploring what it means to read together, is featured (along with lots of other interesting projects) in the new issue of Glowlab ( http://glowlab.com ). Anyone is invited to join the project by receiving a free copy of the most interesting book I read in the last year.

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(1) We Are Reading

We begin with almost nothing, just the act of reading.

Over the next few months, as part of a show with no artworks, "Les formes du delai", at La Box gallery in Bourges, France I'll be thinking through the act of reading as an artistic source. Gradually, the readingbetween.org website will develop as a space for exploring what it might mean to read together, a place to share and exchange what we are reading.

I'll begin with an invitation. The most interesting and pleasurable book I've read over the last year is David Graeber's Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our own Dreams. David Graeber is a brilliant anthropologist, also an anarchist and activist, and his book is one of those where 100 ideas spin off every page. It includes lucid critiques of postmodernism, discussion of gift economies, a really interesting perspective on Marx (which caused me to spend the summer reading Das Kapital), a theory of social creativity, and countless lively anthropological examples. I'm still mulling over a small aside he made on the meaning of men's and women's fashion.

I'd like to invite you to read some David Graeber with me. I'll send a free copy of the book to anyone who wants one -- just email to me with your postal address: sal [at] readingbetween [dot] org